A Tamer of Troubled Schools Offers a Plan for New Orleans

By ADAM NOSSITER

Published: September 24, 2007

The schools here have fresh paint, the bathroom stalls have doors, the library at the largest high school has books again and the angry demonstrations that met last school year's chaotic opening have not been repeated.

For all the problems remaining in the battered public school system here, a wind of renovation is blowing through it, infused with the energy of dozens of young volunteer teachers from all over the nation and of a new superintendent with gold-plated credentials who is vowing transformation.

The schools need it: Hurricane Katrina wiped out what was already a skeleton of a system, and last year's false start -- overcrowded, violent, dispirited -- was hardly a fresh beginning.

Two weeks in, the hallways are calm and heads are bowed in study. Principals report only minor discipline problems -- a few fights -- and a surprising willingness to buckle down.

But against that hope is the underlying reality: a bleak social breakdown decades deep. The new superintendent, Paul G. Vallas, has already seen it up close.

On the first day of school nearly 30 percent of the students did not show up, a truancy rate almost four times the national average.

Hundreds of parents or guardians registered their children at the last minute, in numbers that shocked even Mr. Vallas, a veteran tamer of hard-case schools in Chicago and Philadelphia. Many students -- nobody knows how many -- are hungry.

After several generations of harsh poverty and diminished expectations, for many children and their relatives here going to school has become a matter of indifference.

By the end of the last school year, fewer than half the students in the system were showing up, said Mr. Vallas, who left Philadelphia last spring for the challenge of running the New Orleans Recovery School District, one of three systems in the city.

So the terrain could not appear more infertile for himself and the other eager school reformers who have descended on the city to fix its broken public schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

''I'm just not sure there's very much room to accomplish anything,'' said Carl L. Bankston III, a sociologist at Tulane University who has written extensively about Louisiana schools. ''There was relatively little family control before; there's even less so now.''

Yet of all the many outside experts attracted here by the storm's social revelations, Mr. Vallas has had perhaps the most brutally direct confrontation with them -- and is correspondingly well-placed to meet these challenges head on.

Mr. Vallas, a newcomer with an unblinkered eye, has a plan. It is not exactly like the plans he had for Chicago and Philadelphia, cities where as superintendent he was credited with making sizable dents in the troubles of dysfunctional school systems. He raised test scores, for instance, with the help of after-school programs, and he improved math proficiency and opened new schools.

In New Orleans, the strategy cannot be the same, for a simple reason: ''There's much deeper poverty here,'' Mr. Vallas said. ''So you take deep poverty and then you compound that by the aftermath of the hurricane, by the physical, psychological, emotional damage inflicted by the hurricane. It's like the straw that breaks the camel's back.''

His plan is to have the schools be more than schools. They have to be substitute families, an idea that has been tried elsewhere, though rarely to this extent, and which remains a new concept in New Orleans.

Children are arriving at the schools here hungry, Mr. Vallas said, and they are going to bed hungry. In the summer, children broke into one school to raid a vending machine, they were so hungry. More than 90 percent of his 12,000-odd students in the Recovery School District, now run by the state, are in poverty, and the vast majority are being raised by single parents. Many are not being brought up by their biological parents, Mr. Vallas said, and some are not even living with guardians.

Under these circumstances, he said, focusing on the classroom is not enough. ''You begin to provide the type of services you would normally expect to be provided at home,'' Mr. Vallas said. That means giving the students three meals a day, including hot lunch and dinner. It means providing dental care and eye care.

He intends to tighten up in class as well: a smaller student-teacher ratio, more uniform instruction, new textbooks and technology, partnerships with universities and industry. He has replaced all but one of last year's high school principals.

Mr. Vallas said he had 500 more teachers than last year; at Frederick A. Douglass High School, Jennifer Lee Miller, a geography teacher recruited from Nebraska, has seen her class sizes shrink to 10 students from 50. ''I've been able to build relationships a lot more quickly this year than last year,'' Ms. Miller said.

At John McDonogh Senior High, where the first six weeks last year were punctuated by assaults on security guards, the new principal, Gerald DeBose, said: ''I'm pleasantly surprised by the attitude of the kids. They are acting like they're happy to be here.''

Those who know Mr. Vallas say he has a real chance for success.

''Insofar as one can accomplish anything in the New Orleans public school system,'' said Mr. Bankston of Tulane, ''he probably can accomplish something.''

Still, given ''almost a broken social structure, that's pummeled by this natural disaster,'' as Mr. Vallas put it, classroom changes can have only limited reach.

It is an all-fronts, total-war strategy on what is certainly this city's most deep-rooted social problem. In the first week of school, Mr. Vallas's bunkerlike command post was buzzing with activity well after quitting time. His own plans are delivered in short, staccato bursts; he is brimming not so much with optimism as with projects.

''You begin to make the schools community centers,'' he said. ''The whole objective here is to keep the schools open through the dinner hour, and keep schools open 11 months out of the year.''

The strategy is hardly new. Mr. Vallas put elements of it into effect in the much larger cities he served previously. Yet the scale of it, in New Orleans, will have to be much bigger because of the greater poverty here. Considerably more than half the children here will require this total approach, he said, unlike in Chicago, say, where the figure would have been closer to a third.

And this being New Orleans, with its seemingly impervious social ills, there is plenty of skepticism. Few public school parents showed up several months ago to hear Mr. Vallas outline his plans; the audience consisted largely of would-be reformers from Uptown.

But Mr. Vallas has several advantages over reform-minded predecessors who met unceremonious ends here, victims of racial and political set-tos. The old school bureaucracy was swept away by the storm. His state-run district is small -- 34 schools -- and is just one of three school systems, loosely defined, now operating in this city.

In addition, there are about 40 self-governing charter schools, some with loose relations to Mr. Vallas's district, and five schools still run by the once all-encompassing Orleans Parish School Board.

But before he can do anything, Mr. Vallas has to get the children into the schools. There is some evidence that this is already happening: the truancy rate has dropped to about 15 percent. On the streets in Central City, a tough semi-derelict neighborhood near downtown, only the occasional teenager could be seen hanging out.

''Oh no,'' a young mansaid, pulling his hood over his head and walking away, when asked why he was not in school. A truancy center, quiet and mostly empty on a recent morning, has been opened.

''I'll just focus on what needs to be done,'' Mr. Vallas said. ''The community needs to close ranks and get the kids in school, period. There's no excuses this year.''

PHOTOS: Paul G. Vallas, the superintendent of the New Orleans Recovery School District, visiting students at A. P. Tureaud Elementary.(PHOTOGRAPH BY CHERYL GERBER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES); Students on their first day at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology in the Lower Ninth Ward.(PHOTOGRAPH BY MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES)(pg. A18)